There must be something, some kind of clue, he thought, walking out of the room and along the perimeter of the barn. Minutes later Dan came to the broken board. He studied the hole. Then he noticed a handprint just outside, in the mud, and seconds later he made out the plaid fibers of a Pendleton shirt on the board's rough edge. Maria liked those shirts. A big fan of wool. She had even bought him one.
'Frank, Shane, come here,' Dan called. 'She went through here.'
Two minutes later, Dan was back in the helicopter, flying under the high overcast, studying the terrain. Frank Spinoza had joined him, the pilot, and the sheriff's deputy while Shane followed the trail on the ground.
Situated on a bench near a ridge top, the house was surrounded by thick, mixed conifer forests, with the exception of two small emerald-green meadow areas nearby. At low altitude the forest looked like a textured, rolling mosaic of pointy dark greens-the conifers-and bubblelike, lighter greens-the hardwoods-with occasional flecks of gray and earth-tone reds in areas of thinner growth, where tree trunks were visible. The trail leading from the barn was exceedingly hard to make out, but it was apparent to Dan that if Maria had stayed on the flat bench paralleling the ridge top, she would have remained in the thick forest.
About a mile and a quarter from the house, the bench narrowed and met the headwaters of the Marmon River. Dan willed his eyesight to improve, desperate to see Maria safe, but the forest floor was for the most part obscured from the air; they could fly over a small army and not know it. Occasionally, though, he did catch a glimpse of Shane, moving quickly, jumping over logs, and zigzagging through the trees along the bench like a determined tailback hurtling toward the goal line.
Frank pointed. 'More than likely, if she stayed on the bench, she hit that creek and went down it. It's human nature to run downhill when you're in trouble-and water always leads to civilization. Let's concentrate there.'
28
Maria moved quickly despite the pain in her hands and the watering of her eyes, able through years of conditioning to maintain a steady jog except in the most obstructed areas. By her reckoning, she was now more than a mile from the barn. Moving through some dense brush, she suddenly imagined that she could hear a low- flying helicopter. She stopped, looked up, but could see nothing through the dense canopy of leaves. Could be the police, she thought-or it could be the bad guys. She plunged on through the forest, head down, moving like an animal, making herself small by shrugging her shoulders inward, squeezing along narrow pathways in the underbrush.
After traveling for about forty-five minutes, she began following a small stream downhill, but the stream's course was choked with fallen trees. Growing up through the crisscrossed logs were huckleberry, salmonberry, thimbleberry, young alders, and a host of other greenery, all of it forming an almost impassable wall. It was tough- going: a bruising, scraping, and soon bloody experience. She was forced to move up the sidehill, higher up the ravine above the creek bottom.
She had been running for maybe twenty minutes when she came to the first marijuana patch. Black plastic pipe traversed the hillside, sometimes partly buried and sometimes above ground, feeding the young marijuana plants in their large clay pots. The pots had been placed next to large trees, effectively concealed from prying eyes in police helicopters.
Knowing she was in danger from growers determined to keep their gardens a secret, Maria moved quickly downstream, where the country opened up. The trees and undergrowth thinned, allowing her to move easily-not hunched over all the time-but also making her more vulnerable to detection. Natural meadows formed great green ribbons down the hillside. Interspersed with the meadows were patches of forest comprised of leafy hardwoods and arrow-shaped conifers. Maria moved along the meadow edges now, trying to stay hidden without delving into the denser forest. Deep blue-gray gullies were water-carved, appearing like giant tears flowing down the flanks of the mountain, often choked with brush, sometimes vertical sided and not easily crossable. She suspected she was on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property, designated a wilderness area despite the pot-growing squatters.
About thirty more minutes downstream, she turned and looked up at the terrain she'd just descended. What she saw sent a wave of fear through her. Far up on the sidehill, near the ridgeline above the creek, a lone figure moved quickly down the mountain. While the figure was not directly on her trail, he or she was moving in the same general direction and was no more than half a mile behind.
Maria's heart began to pound. If she could see the pursuer, then the pursuer might well have seen her. She considered her options. She could try to hide by losing herself in the brush, or she could run. Hiding might mean an overnight stay under a clump of trees, in nothing but a wool shirt. Capture by the kidnappers would be unlikely, even if they had radios and several hunters, but the chilly night could be brutal. Running in the dark was not a much more enticing option. What if she hurt herself on the trail? Run or hide?
Until dark, at least, she had to keep moving.
Turning downstream toward civilization would be the likely choice for Maria, but Corey knew that lower on the slopes she would find pot gardens, probably guarded by unpredictable men with tangled hair and beards, men living in hovels, who could or would do nothing else for a living, who lived outside the law. Such men didn't mind long stretches without much company under hard, primitive conditions. Each year they suffered the elements, thieves among their own kind, government raids, the threat of imprisonment, and the risk of great bodily harm or death at the hands of whoever happened to oppose them-and there were many who had reason to oppose them.
She considered how she might turn that situation to her advantage.
The second marijuana plantation was much larger than the first. Plants were everywhere, by almost every big tree. Some trees had several pots. And the plants were big. Already some were four feet high. Maria realized she was looking at millions of dollars in marijuana. What wouldn't they do to protect it? She had to get away from this place, across the creek and to the far side of the canyon, where there was no southern exposure-without the sun there would be no gardens. But as she tried to find a place to descend the precipitous mountainside to get to the creek, she was suddenly shaken by the coarse, boisterous blaring of an air horn. Adrenaline shot into her system as she looked around. Then at her feet she saw a trip wire. Damn. She was in the open near a steep embankment. She could hear someone coming. Galvanized into action, she went feetfirst down an almost vertical bank.
Within seconds she heard voices.
'Well, la-di-da.' She whipped around and saw a sandy-haired man with a sly grin coming at her, a knife in his right hand and a military-style rifle in his left. The gun was pointed at her midriff.
'Take it easy now or I'm gonna put a bullet in you.'
He wore a stained, heavy wool, half-unbuttoned shirt that revealed soiled long underwear beneath. There were small shells hanging around his neck, five earrings going up his ear, and a little patch of hair on his chin, with several days' growth on the rest of his face. Three feet away from her, he stopped. The muzzle of the rifle was in her belly.
He spoke into a radio.
'I think it was just another deer.'
'I'm telling you I saw a woman coming down that hill.'
'I'll keep looking.'
He grinned at her again.
'I don't want to bother the rest of them just yet. Best I'd get is sloppy seconds.'
Her insides turned sick. 'You want sex?'
'Aren't you a mind reader?'
'Show me your hard-on,' she said.
He laughed. 'You gotta be shittin' me.'
'I like to fuck as well as the next girl, but I wanna see what I got to work with.'
He looked around for a moment.
'You first.'
'Oh, come on, inspire me.' She stepped close, sliding past the gun barrel, walking right up to the knife.
'You try anything and I'll twist this knife right in your gut.'
